


Still I See Monsters

by inlovewithnight



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-10
Updated: 2010-02-10
Packaged: 2017-10-07 04:04:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for the Picfor1000 challenge (writing a story of exactly 1000 words based on an assigned picture).</p>
    </blockquote>





	Still I See Monsters

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Picfor1000 challenge (writing a story of exactly 1000 words based on an assigned picture).

You know they're a couple of liars.

The shorter one's all big smile, smooth talking, trying to flirt his way past your desk, and you want to tell him to take his charm and shove it. He's not your type. Neither is the tall one, for that matter, but at least he can keep his mouth shut.

You work in a psychiatric institution. You are familiar with liars.

He keeps talking and talking. You glance at his badge—fake, fake, you had as many fake IDs in college as anyone and you know—and cut him off. "Mr. Cassidy?"

"Yeah?"

You look from him to the other one. "Are you and Mr. Kidd friends of the patient?"

"Like I said, ma'am, we're investigating--"

"Are you his friends?"

The tall one finally speaks up. "Yes. We are."

"Okay." You stand up and open the door. "That's all I need to know."  
**  
You're not supposed to care about the patients. Especially not the John Does. There's no point.

This one, especially—no point. There's no hope. The rest of the staff just calls him by his number. So do you, out loud.

In your head, though, he's the one with the eyes.  
**  
B. Cassidy and S. Kidd, as if you're not going to figure that out. You want to ask them what their real names are, but they've both gone quiet as you walk them down the halls. You understand, in a detached way. Everything has to be detached, here. It's the only way.

"How is he?" the tall one asks, and you pause, your hand hovering over another door.

"How do you think?" you reply. "He's in a facility for the criminally insane."

They look at each other for a beat, and you fight a smile, deciding that your first impression was wrong and they're really very young.

"Besides that," the tall one mutters, frowning, and you shrug, because what can you say?

"Does he, uh—" The shorter one coughs and stutters before he goes on. "Does he hear voices?"

You blink. You laugh. They stare.

"Actually," you tell them, "no."   
**  
He always sits at the window in his room. You suspect that's why he breaks so badly after a stay in isolation: he can't see the sun.

It's not much of a view: just a section of wall, an ugly stone monster clinging to the roof, a patch of sky.  
**  
"Christ," one of them whispers when you open the door. The patient doesn't even look up. "Jesus Christ."

You had thought maybe he might; for the last few days he's been anxious, according to all the charts, and he'd told his doctor he thought someone was coming.

You should know better than to hope, by now. There's no way he could have known, and there's no way these two can help.

"This is a bad day," you say, because there is nothing else to say. You should call the orderlies. You should call his doctor. There should be restraints and syringes, the delicate juggling of chemicals. There should be a trip to the silent, skyless, safe, empty room.

"I can't hear it," he says, and both of the visitors flinch at his voice, or maybe at the blood running down his fingers to the floor. "I can't hear him."

"Who?" the shorter one says. "And what the hell happened to you?"

The patient looks up, and again you're struck by those eyes, always. They're different from your average lunatic's eyes. Your average patient's.

"Dean," he says, "Sam." And he smiles.

It would be so lovely, if not for the blood.  
**  
The bad days come on no calendar you can see. You asked him once, in frustration with his pain and his refusal to feel it, why they came.

"You don't remember," he said. "None of you do. I suppose I should understand. It was all a very long time ago."  
**  
There are scars on his face, ugly ropy twists of tissue from temple to jaw, both sides. They're bleeding now, anew. Someone let his fingernails grow longer than cut-to-the-quick. Possibly it was you.

"He does that to himself?" the tall one—Sam—asks, his voice rough. "Why?"

"He can't hear something," you answer, watching Dean trace the writing on the walls. Some is pencil, some is crayon; those are older, only painted over every few months.

Some is in blood, and that's new, that's why he'll be going to the isolation room as soon as the ten minutes you can buy them runs out.

"He wants to," you continue, your voice a surprise. "But he can't."

"He can hear us," Sam says, uncertain. You shrug and watch Dean touch your patient's words.

The walls say father, father, father, over and over again, in between drawings of wings.  
**  
He smiles when he looks out the window, whether there's sunshine or rain, wind or snow. "It's beautiful," he told you once, when all you saw was drizzle and mud. "It's such a beautiful world."

The rain ran down the stone monster's face like tears, and you couldn't see it.  
**  
"It wasn't like this for Anna," Dean hisses, waving his hands. "Losing her grace didn't make her crazy."

"It was different for him," Sam says. "Anna didn't quit in the middle of a—"

"Did you stop it?"

You look up at the sound of his voice, hoarse and rough and uncertain. You hear hope in his voice, ragged and frayed but still there long after it should be gone.

"Yeah," Sam says. "We did."

He smiles, just a little, more beautiful than you can stand to see. "Then it is worth it."

"Yeah." Dean's voice is harsh. "You can't hear God and you're crazy and you're clawing your face off, but it's worth it."

That smile, still. "But He sent you to tell me, didn't He?"

You can't hear this. It isn't meant for you.

You look out the window. It's turning evening, and shadows fall from the monster's wings.

**Author's Note:**

> This ended up being an exercise in structure for me, and as typically happens when I go structure-happy, I couldn't stop. The structure is in the word count of each section; the challenge requires a word count of exactly 1000, and here that's divided a follows: 150-50-150-50-200-500-150-50-150.
> 
> I'm not 100% I didn't sacrifice content to structure, here. This idea might have worked better more fleshed-out and less chained to wordcount constraints (both the challenge's and my own arbitrarily-imposed ones). But I enjoyed the challenge of playing inside the lines. And there's nothing *stopping* me from writing a more expanded version of the idea, of course.
> 
> The relationship between content and structure always fascinates me. Here, the outcome is, to me, a kind of experimental piece.


End file.
